Levitation sans highfalutin – in Paris

Vandana Shukla

Big cities don’t allow you gravity-free ascension to scan a sliver of sky they afford. Paris (let’s call it Paari for Parisians) lets you fly, so I heard. Yet, December isn’t the best time to be in the French capital, I was told. But in Paris, there ought to be something eternal, I thought. So here I was at Charles de Gaulle Airport, a little anxious, a little nervous. A tall man, in three-piece suit appears with a smile. He held an Apple ipad, it had my picture!

There are boulevards and I follow others while crossing a road; it’s not important where you come from. What matters is where you are going. That’s what they say. My mind is heavy with impressions of beauty, presumed weight of magnificence. Over there, two tall chimneys tend to size up the sky; their white smoke appears to cut the dark, gloomy firmament into two. The smoke spreads like unlocked hair on the spotless Paari face. The city, most frequented by globe trotters is strangely grey mostly. And its people appear to accentuate this greyness by wearing black, browns and different shades of grey. There’s hardly any other colour barring a few fading Maple leaves stuck to branches astir in the wind, cold and chilling.

But it’s no less important who you are in the city of romance. American jazz legend Miles Davis crops up. ‘A day in Paris’ plays on in the corner of my mind. He was among so many black American musicians who fell for the charm of Paris. Was I carrying the boundaries along? I met quizzical looks when I asked for a vegetarian meal in at least three restaurants. My god, they don’t understand what a vegetarian sandwich is. After two days of struggle I surrendered to the idea of veggie food being a variety of salads. For the third day’s dinner I decide to eat strawberries with croissants, bought from a local store. But more than half the box of strawberries turned out to be rotten!

Standing apart

The city carries an unmistakable air of dominance; all its grand sculptures, Roman and Baroque architecture and wide boulevards are reminders of the great victories of their Ceasars and Napoleans. Not that there were no defeats and revolts that devastated Paris. Their remnants are not visible openly in public spaces. They are confined to museums. What impresses me most is the respect shown for pedestrians amid signs of burgeoning development. On most roads more space is spared for pedestrian movement than for vehicular traffic. Homeless beggars are present on almost all streets, their bowls show the lowest denominations. Charity is only chillar (loose change) globally! 

To my surprise the ubiquitous French symmetry is applied to the tall trees lining the Place de la Concorde, where the famous Egyptian obelisk stands. I ask a professor if the trees grow alike or they are pruned to look alike. “We like to control everything, it gives us a sense of power,” he chuckles. “More than half of Europe’s happiness is drug-induced, in a decade anti-depressants’ consumption has grown by 80 per cent in the continent,” he says. The greyness of the place explains why so many of its great writers and philosophers wrote books confronting existentialistic dilemmas. Under their nose grew the Pont des Arts, where lovers would put “love locks” and would throw the key in the Seine, creating new superstitions. The locks weighed up to 45 tonnes in May this year, when the city council decided to cut off the railing to free the bridge of the load of locks.

…what brings me here

India-born artist Bhawani Katoch came to see me, despite his daughter’s ballet performance that morning at Palais Garnier, where the best in the world aspire to perform. His daughter was picked when she was only 7 by the prestigious Ballet School of the Opera National de Paris, which selects only few children from across the globe. They undergo back-breaking training, under intense care of physiotherapists and nutritionists based on sophisticated mix of science and art. The dancers’ training and education is sponsored by the French government. Bhawani and his Korean wife graduated from Ecole des Beaux–Arts, Paris. His beautiful daughters thrive in a new world that is not bound by either Indian or Korean cultural confines. They have made choices about their calling in life; they speak French, English, and a bit of Korean and Hindi and move seamlessly between cultures.

Coffee, ya coffee!

Bhawani takes me to Café de Flore, one of the oldest and most prestigious coffeehouses of Paris, which was patronised by the best known French authors, philosophers and artists like Pablo Picasso. Even Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai was a frequent patron during his stay in Paris in the 1920s. Coffeehouses are an integral part of the intellectual life in Paris; when great writers like Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre did not have heat in their homes, they spent long hours in these cafes to deliberate and to write. Tea costs 12 euros (about Rs 870) in a café. I choose coffee to realise my tea addiction is a legacy of the English colonialism. Parisians are coffee and wine drinkers. An unwritten law prevents customers from taking pictures in the cafe. You never know the person sitting next to you could be a celebrity. And celebrities don’t like being clicked in their private moments! 

French resistance

I could not resist visiting the site of terrorist attack of Nov 13 at Saint Denis and Bataclan theatre, which killed 130 people, to gauge public mood. Life is going on as usual in the area, except that a few shutters are still down. For almost half a kilometre you can see the road lined with flowers and bouquets and messages of love for the dead. The next day election results were out and the French rejected the extreme Right candidate Marine Le Pen and Marion De Pen in favour of the Republicans. The French daily Le Figaro carried an interesting visual showing Le Pen as one of the ubiquitous busts of its historical figures lining numerous French museums. She is history. Is she?

At one time if Charlie Hebdo published 70,000 copies lampooning Islam, at Louvre the same French added Islamic art wing, for a cost of 100 million euros. With the classicism of art displayed at Louvre, IM Pei’s pyramid like glass structure adds a new modern landmark. The whole section of Renaissance art depicts violent struggles of Christianity. Most people skip this section to get a selfie with Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Bang opposite Mona Lisa is an imposing work by another Italian artist Veronese. The lavishly detailed altar painting of biblical scene is about the ‘last supper’ of Christ, but the painter cleverly titled it ‘The Wedding Feast at Cana’ to avoid confrontations with the Vatican. Christ is only by the way in this work, infused with high-life of Venice depicted with a comical perspective. These paintings too have visitors from some other space and time. They too are trying to figure out the world. 

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